In the Middle

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Peasants are the Real Victims of Game of Thrones’ final episodes, and in the real world, so are we.

By Cord J. Whitaker

In Game of Thrones, as the Mother of Dragons soars above and burns everything in sight, the huddled, pleading peasantry sets the scene for a showdown between Jon Snow’s ethics and Daenerys’ desire for vengeance. But the battle is really between a convenient plot device and historical reality. The peasants are that battle’s victims.

Courtesy of HBO

Combustible as they are, they are also fuel for white supremacy.

Season 8, Episode 5 begins with Cersei enacting a plan we knew was coming. The peasants who live outside King’s Landing are racing to get inside the city walls. Even a casual viewer who has only started watching in this, the show’s final season, would know that Cersei is planning to use the people as a human shield. She, as Daenerys flatly puts it, considers her rival’s mercy a weakness. Dany has learned a few lessons about weakness, though, since she nearly lost the Slaver’s Bay city of Mereen because she freed the slaves but did not kill the masters. She was too merciful. She will not let that happen again. Cersei, of course, considers Dany’s signature act, the act of freeing slaves—let alone sparing their defeated masters—already too merciful. Too weak.

Soon the camera pans in from the racing crowd to focus on a mother and her young daughter—six or seven years old perhaps. As the mother drags her daughter along, attempting to keep her from being trampled in the fray, the girl clutches a wooden horse figurine. We know these characters will be minor but significant. The viewer already wants them to survive.

The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Dany and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Dany and her forces—even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm—are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her—the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior—i.e., a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black.

If Arya is dismayed by the indiscriminate killing, Jon Snow is all the more disturbed. The episode features more than a few scenes of Jon staring at one atrocity, and then another, in horror. It is as if he has never participated in the violence of war. But he has. In one case, Jon catches a member of Team Daenerys preparing to rape a pleading woman. Jon stops him, and then kills him.

The near rape scene, along with Arya’s mother-daughter duo, draws an ethical comparison between Jon, and with him Starks in general, and Daenerys, who burns and pillages from the air. We get the sense that Dany and Jon’s romantic relationship probably won’t survive. The viewer would do well to remember that Dany, a victim of assault herself, certainly would not approve of any of her retinue committing rape. But she is busy burning everything and everyone in sight and is not on the ground to witness war crimes or punish warriors for them. Jon is left to avenge the peasant where he can and to wrestle with his girlfriend-aunt’s willingness to treat them as collateral damage. By the end of the episode, Jon looks like the good guy.

Cersei is defeated and, presumably, dead. (The Sopranos-style fade-to-black leaves one to wonder.) In Episode 6, the throne of the Seven Kingdoms will fall to its Targaryen heir, and whether that will be Jon or Dany is playing out on the backs of Kings Landing’s peasants. In Season 8, the peasants are but pawns in a queen’s, and king’s, game.

The peasants are not only Dany’s victims. They are Jon’s, too. Even more importantly, they are also the victims of Song of Ice and Fire writer George R.R. Martin and HBO showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.

Martin, Weiss, and Benioff have claimed that they want to combine“the realism of historical fiction with some of the appeal of fantasy,”and that they seek to present something like the ‘real’ Middle Ages. But the huddled masses of peasantry we encounter in Episode 5 are a simplistic and unrealistic representation of medieval tenant farmers. The so-called ‘peasants’ revolts’ that rocked England and Europe in 1380 and 1381 are a prime example of peasant power. In response to what they considered unfair taxation, farmers in England rose up against their lords, the members of the burgeoning merchant class, and Church and secular officials. In England, they streamed into London, murdered well-to-do merchants, brutally beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and negotiated with the king from the banks of the Thames. He floated on a barge in the middle of the river from what he hoped was a safe distance. The peasants had identified and threatened his mother and her retinue as they returned to London at the end of a journey. These peasants were not people who feared royal power.

Nor were they afraid to use institutions to challenge their superiors. We have records of litigation in which farmers challenged lords who behaved too oppressively, and local manor courts made up of peasants had the right to fine the lord. As medieval historian Christopher Dyer points out, medieval peasants lived in “substantial houses” and preeminent British historian of the Middle Ages Terry Jones points out that “the amount of work required to pay rent and taxes was probably pretty similar to that needed now.” While the show has had some moments in which stereotypical power dynamics were inverted—such as Cersei’s walk of shame when, not yet on the throne, she was paraded naked through the city and pelted with rotten food and excrement as an act of forced contrition for her sins—for the most part, the common people have been presented as hapless and in awe of, or grateful for, the power of their lords, ladies, kings, and queens. This is not the real Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, Martin, Weiss, and Benioff are not the only people who believe that the peasant cowering before a nobility with unchecked power represents the real Middle Ages. I tip my hat to Helen Young of Deakin University in Australia; she has spent countless hours examining white supremacist websites for their medievalism. One telling comment on the well known site Stormfront reads:

Martin’s interpretation and the Stormfront commenter’s ideal of the Middle Ages is not one in which power is shared. Perhaps this is why, despite many speculations that Dany and Jon could marry and many viewers’ hopes that they would, the idea is quickly dashed by Dany’s longtime advisor Lord Varys in Season 8, Episode 4 when Tyrion suggests it. Dany, Varys opines, would never share power. Why would she? After all, Game of Thrones’is not a medieval world in which a court made up of peasants can decide to fine their lord on behalf of other peasants.

Game of Thrones comes to its end in an age when the Middle Ages have become a rallying point for white nationalism and supremacy. When white nationalists marched on Charlottesville in August 2017, they bore medieval-style shields; the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire, founded in the Middle Ages; and banners emblazoned with medieval runes. On March 15, 2019, an Australian man stormed into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51 people. He injured another 49. His arsenal and battle gear were covered with references to the Middle Ages, from the black sun inspired by the designs on early medieval Merovingian discs—Heinrich Himmler made it into a symbol for Nazi Germany’s SS in the 1930s—to the name of Charles Martel, the Frankish leader who in 732 defeated a Muslim army that was advancing on the French city of Tours. Martel was grandfather to Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. How we interpret the history of the Middle Ages is a life and death matter.

And so is how we interpret its peasantry. Much white supremacist medievalism draws its power from two ideas: first, that medieval Europe was homogeneously white (and the peasant masses in Episode 5 were, from what I could tell, all white); and second, that a young white man can and should can claim spiritual nobility, a spiritual knightliness, and the entitlements that come with it. In fact, the Italian philosopher and self-appointed medievalist who inspired Benito Mussolini’s fascist racism has been connected with Steve Bannon and is cited outright by alt-right leader Richard Spencer. According to him, the “exoteric tradition represented by devotional Christianity” was of an “inferior character” to the “higher forms of spirituality” practiced by the likes of the Knights Templar. A peasant could attain knighthood if he only tapped into his superlative spiritual worth. It is known that economic disadvantage plays a role in the development of alt-right and other white supremacist attitudes. As long as peasants are portrayed as downtrodden masses, then young white men in America, Europe, and the West more broadly who feel economically disadvantaged due to geographical location, educational level, or multi-generational poverty are encouraged to fashion themselves the peasants who will rise to become knights. The narrative is seductive. To a certain extent, it is the narrative animating Jon Snow’s character, and even King Arthur’s. But it is faulty and, when pushed to its extremes, deadly.

Game of Thrones has made for exceptional TV precisely because it has shied away from facile conclusions and instead has focused on the uncertainty—between justice and injustice, between lies and truth—that characterizes the real world. The depiction of a completely powerless peasantry readily herded into the killing fields is not in keeping with the more complicated spirit of a story of political intrigue. You can never really know whose side someone like Varys—or Tyrion—is on, so why should you know that the peasants will fall for Cersei’s tricks or suffer at the hands of any king or queen? Worse yet, the depiction fuels the fire for white supremacists who wish to see the world in black and white. They can easily imagine themselves peasant victims, and they can delightfully imagine themselves hero knights who rise up to defend their people. That fantasy is what was behind carrying faux medieval shields at Charlottesville, but it shouldn’t be what’s behind an interest in watching Game of Thrones.

If the showrunners can right the ship for a final episode in which Dany doesn’t have to viciously kill Jon to retain the throne, or in which Jon doesn’t have to save humanity from the Mad King Redux by killing Dany, Game of Thrones has the chance to do a new thing by showing its viewers that power in our world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. If there can be room for more than one person—representing various genders, races, creeds, and class backgrounds—sharing power at a round table à la King Arthur’s, then racist ideologies become a whole lot less attractive.

If, on the other hand, Game of Thrones concludes while doing TV business as usual, then racism and the Cersei-style manipulation of class that feeds it will continue uninterrupted. The peasants will remain victims even when they think they’ve become knights, whether in the show’s world or ours.

Cord J. Whitakerresearches and teaches late medieval English literature and studies medieval religious conflict and the history of race at Wellesley College. He is one of the bloggers at In the Middle. His book entitled “Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking” will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2019.

Tuesday, April 09, 2019

Following upon the inaugural Race Before Race [#RaceB4Race] event, a collaboration of medievalists and early modernists held at Arizona State University in January 2019, this conference will foreground the relationship between race and historical periodization. Medievalists and early modernists have long grappled with the meaning and use of their own historical period designations as well as the strictures of periodization itself. This event seeks to explore how critical race theory can enable new insights about, approaches to, and critiques of periodization. Critical race theory situated in both historical and contemporary disciplines necessarily challenges assumptions about historical knowledge, theoretical borders, and scholarly dissemination and impact. This theoretical complex thus holds exciting potential to revolutionize the very terms of academic periodization in medieval and early modern studies. Setting this conference at the Folger Institute and building upon its recent focus on early modern race studies, the conference invites scholars of history, literature, and other disciplines to consider the intersection of critical race studies and historical periodization in terms of the theoretical, methodological, archival, activist, pedagogical, professional, temporal, and spatial implications.

Invited SpeakersGeraldine Heng (University of Texas) and Francesca Royster (DePaul University) will open the conference on Thursday evening at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

On Friday and Saturday at Arizona State University’s Barrett & O’Connor Washington Center, eight speakers will deliver presentations and lead sessions on the topics outlined above:

Thursday, April 04, 2019

Along
with mainstream white America, Medieval Studies has undergone a racial
awakening over the last few years, as the Trump presidency has emboldened
and even sanctioned a
rise in openly avowed white nationalism. The recent massacre against a Muslim
community in Christchurch, New Zealand—Ōtautahi,
Aotearoa—is the latest devastating example of white terrorism, where the shooter praised the U.S. president and was nearly condoned by an Australian senator. And as we have seen the racist medievalism in the
terrorist’s manifesto,
those of us who work in Medieval Studies have once again found ourselves
confronted with the sinister links between our work and white supremacy. As a
scholar of medieval literature, I know it is my responsibility to think about
these connections, something I have urged my colleagues to do as well. And as we do, we can’t ultimately look past how whiteness
inheres within the very construct of the medieval, and how Medieval Studies as a thing in itself poses a problem
for all of us who believe in social and racial justice.

“Medieval”
refers specifically to the historical period between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the Renaissance, a temporal construct that is inextricably tied to
the spatial construct of Western Europe. And just as Western Europe has been
constructed through (what bell hooks has so incisively named) the imperialist
white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so too does the “medieval” carry this
valence of power. It comes as no surprise, then, that for white supremacists, the
“medieval” furnishes a heritage site for whiteness. Within their
ideology, medieval imagery such as the Othala Rune,
Tyr Rune, and
Celtic Crosses serve as symbols that aim to transform
that whiteness from an oppressive power structure into a cultural and
ethnic heritage. They then assert this whiteness as
a vulnerable identity under attack, one that needs protection from what
they see as the genocidal threat of multiculturalism. For example, at the deadly
Unite the Right rally in August 2017, where white supremacists converged in the
name of protecting “white heritage” (specifically, to keep the Robert E. Lee
statue from being taken down), the Othala Rune appeared prominently on many banners.
This pan-Germanic runic letter means heritage and inheritance, particularly in
relation to homeland. It has been appropriated as a white supremacist symbol
since the 1930s, and it becamethe official
symbol of the Prinz Eugen wing of the Nazi party in Croatia. Today, it is
featured heavily within white supremacist circles.Not only did we see it at Charlottesville, but it is also a common
tattoo and has even been commercialized.

One
company sells numerous products branded with various white supremacist symbols,
including medieval ones, such as shirts and buttons with the Othala rune, a
Thor hammer with runes on it, and a shirt with a Celtic cross overlaid on the
Confederate flag. The company’s tagline, “It’s not illegal to be white…yet,” reflects
the myth of white genocide. At the same time, the accompanying logo is a white
hand holding a noose, explicitly referencing the socially sanctioned extrajudicial
killings of black people. We can see clearly how they present white violence as
a justified necessity. These same ideologies motivated the Christchurch terrorist
attack and informed the Australian senator’s tirade that seemed to endorse it.

This
connection between the medieval and white supremacy is not new, and
in fact the Christchurch terrorist cites inspiration from another white terrorist with racist medievalist fantasies. The events in Charlottesville,
however, struck the loudest wake-up call
for most academic medievalists. After Charlottesville, in what felt like
an overnight turn, a field that had previously shunned discussions of race and
racism became hungry for them. Over the last year and a half, we have seen an immense proliferation of conference sessions, symposia, think pieces,
new dissertations, and new courses on both the whiteness of Medieval Studies
and the racist appropriation of the “medieval” beyond academia. In a powerful essay
about Anglo-Saxon Studies, in particular, Mary Rambaran-Olm describes the
racism that has pushed many scholars of color out of the field, and academia in
general.

There has also emerged a particular
form of public medievalist discourse that focuses primarily on correcting
racist misconceptions about the Middle Ages. While certainly useful, as it
provides the public with an important education and demonstrates why studying
the distant past still matters in the present, this work has largely been
missing the rigor of anti-racist critique. Unfortunately, in one of the only
published critiques of this work I’ve seen, a bravado of white masculinity
prevented any chance of raising this issue for a productive public
conversation. In fact, in the social media debate that followed Sam Fallon’s
harsh Chronicle of Higher Edarticle,
it was difficult to see past all the mansplaining whiteness on both sides until
Jenny Tan cut right through it in a brilliant twitter thread
that named the problem for what it is: “white progressive self-importance that
is really more about self-promotion than social or political principle.” Tan
trenchantly elaborates on this point in another thread,
where she describes precisely the kind of white ally-ship dominating public
medievalist discourse.

The most popular example of this
kind of work is The Public Medievalist’s series “Race, Racism, and the Middle
Ages.” The series seems to approach the racist appropriation of the medieval as
an external problem out there that
threatens an innocent love for the medieval past. In other words, the series
aims to reclaim the medieval past from white supremacists—placing it back in the
hands of academic medievalists and cosplayers who hold a non-racist love for the medieval. There’s nothing particularly
wrong with this aim, and it is certainly understandable, as no decent person
wants to be associated with the same things as white supremacists. But this
approach can inadvertently lead to a protection of white innocence rather than
an anti-racist intervention. Of course, not all of the essays in the series
reflect this type of scaffolding: for example, essays by Helen Young, Matthew
Vernon, and Eric Weiskott (and certainly others) clearly frame their analyses
of racist medievalisms through a framework informed by critical race studies.
On the whole, however, the series is too invested in the innocence of good
white people to see its own limitations for productive anti-racist critique.

In one particular essay about how
we can hold onto medieval symbols that have been misappropriated, the author (likely
unwittingly) defends racism—at least, the accidental kind. He suggests that
these symbols can be saved by both signaling their non-racist meaning and
learning to identify when they are wielded with racist intent or not; or, in
cases where you can’t tell, to offer the benefit of the doubt to the bearer of
the symbol. This argument necessarily centers white viewers who have the luxury—the
privilege—of caring about intent when it comes to racism. In a series
explicitly about opposing racism, it seems astounding that we would find an
essay so irresponsibly protecting accidental racists. But it becomes less
surprising when we glimpse the contributor list and see that it is nearly all
white, or when we view the poster that captures the overall tenor of the series.
The poster is clearly not informed by critical race studies, and it even praises
“melting pot” societies—a problematic concept that is not about inclusion, but
rather the assimilation of non-white cultures into white dominance. I called
out the problem with this language on Facebook, and they subsequently revised
it to “multicultural societies” for the version they now sell on their website
(without signaling the rationale for the change, and thus profiting off the
constructive feedback of people of color without acknowledging our labor), and
I do wonder about their critical awareness of multiculturalism
as well. The “melting pot” is about erasure; so in a twisted sense, the poster
captures precisely how this series can erase people of color—both our bodies
and our intellectual output—from its discourse on race and racism, while congratulating
itself for doing good anti-racist work.

Even though the series editors are
not race scholars or activists, or even scholars of color with experiential
knowledge about racism, many medievalists turn to them as expert sources on how
to teach race in their classrooms. Why does Medieval Studies accept non-experts
as its leaders in this work? As race and racism have become trendy topics among
medievalists, white (and predominantly male) medievalists have jumped on the
bandwagon, claiming expertise they have not earned, and too many in the field
sanction them—but why? It seems too simplistic to point to the patriarchal
whiteness of Medieval Studies itself for an answer, but that is where we can
find it: white men have always held the most authority in our field; and so, it
seems, the field turns to them for leadership even in conversations about race
and racism. How different would this series have been if its editors recognized
their own lack of expertise on the
topic they sought to promote? Perhaps they would have built a platform where
black feminist theories, queer of color critiques, and other methodologies
generally absent in Medieval Studies could begin to inform our analyses of
racist uses of the Middle Ages. Instead, The Public Medievalist and our field gives us more whiteness,
more white feelings, and more white supremacy even as we are told these are the
things they are fighting against.

Institutional Change

Racism is about the structural ways
in which people of color, and particularly black and indigenous peoples, have
been disenfranchised by various forms of violence and oppression. Anti-racist
strategies for correcting racist appropriations must necessarily address
structural change within the institutions that have facilitated not only racist
appropriations, but also the conditions that produce white terrorism in the first
place. Andrew Elliott has argued
that “as medievalists we ought to refocus our attention away from the direct
referent of a given medievalism, and onto the context in which it is used as
well as the mechanism by which that medievalism is disseminated” (3). The
historical accuracy of the referent isn’t what matters: what matters are the
conditions and contexts surrounding the referent in our own time. Disrupting
the narrative of a white Middle Ages protects Medieval Studies from accusations
of racism, but it does little to address racism itself. In other words, as we assert
that medievalists don’t only study
and promote the histories of white people, we also overlook how we do promote whiteness through the
disciplinary construct of the “medieval.”

Seeta Chaganti’s essays for Public
Books about both the Trump
administration and the Confederate
monuments, Jonathan Hsy’s essay about antiracist
medievalism and the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as Peter Baker’s reflections
post-Charlottesville on the Medievalists of Color blog, give us excellent
examples of public medievalist scholarship that does serve anti-racism. These pieces not only center people of
color in their discussions (a bare minimum expectation), but also recognize the
complexity of our experiences with race and racism, as well as accurately identify
white supremacy as a power structure that doesn’t merely reside within the
hearts and minds of individuals, but within oppressive institutions that thrive
on everyday, insidious racial violence.

Significant
strides have been made toward institutional equity over the past few years,
notably in the Medieval Academy of America, which instituted a Diversity &
Inclusivity Committee last year. Their recent annual conference took the
theme “The Global Turn,” deliberately breaking away from its more traditional
program, which has been known for its emphasis on Western European and
Christian history. Yet, strikingly absent from their line-up of keynote
speakers, new fellow inductions, and prestigious award winners were scholars of
color. A name most glaringly absent from these lists was Geraldine Heng, an
early founder of Global Medieval Studies whose voice in the field has also
provided necessary critiques regarding its political implications. But of
course progress takes time and we can’t expect overnight change. The field has
shown a genuine concern about its link to white nationalist movements, and even
a central institution like the MAA is mobilizing toward solutions.

Medieval
Studies is investing energy and resources into inclusivity initiatives, and it
is certainly about time. But we must not confuse the institutionalization of diversity
work with anti-racist or decolonizing work. The former protects the
institution—in this case, Medieval Studies—whereas the latter would tear it
down.

The overwhelming whiteness of
the field and the public appropriation of the medieval by white supremacists
are undoubtedly related to how the field has been formulated. Sometimes too much focus is put on distinguishing ourselves from them out there so that we can allow white supremacy to be seen as
something existing outside of ourselves, as if white supremacy were not
something we uphold in the institutions we serve. Describing this dynamic,
Sara Ahmed has written,
“The reduction of racism to the figure of ‘the racist’ allows structural
or institutional forms of racism to recede from view, by projecting racism onto
a figure that is easily discarded (not only as someone who is ‘not me’ but also
as someone who is ‘not us,’ who does not represent a cultural or institutional
norm)” (150).It may be that a field like
Medieval Studies as such needs to be dismantled and something else in its stead
built up from the ground. Geraldine Heng, as a founder of the concept and
someone who has thought about the “global medieval” for decades, has suggested
we move toward “early globalities” as an alternative, thereby shedding a
restrictive Eurocentric term when studying an interconnected past. And, as Adam Miyashiro has explained—it really is about time that scholars stop using the blatantly white supremacist settler colonial terms "Anglo-Saxon" and "Anglo-Saxonist" to describe themselves and their work.

If we want to be anti-racist, we
need to start thinking more radically about how we can reformulate our field in
our teaching, graduate training, and public outreach. These priorities will necessarily
require institutional change, and may even mean leaving behind this thing we
currently call Medieval Studies.

Thanks to Leila K. Norako, the other editors and co-bloggers of In the Middle, Mary Rambaran-Olm, and
Adam Miyashiro for their excellent feedback on this essay.

Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College, where she also currently holds a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her PhD in 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Today seems a good day to remind our readers of the In the Middle statement of values, which we re-publish in various forms as the times demand.

ITM is a feminist, anti-racist, queer affirmative, refuge making space. We repudiate white supremacist dreams of both the Middle Ages and contemporary nations. We foster visions of the past and future that privilege diversity, community and welcome over intolerance, segregation, violence and willed forgetting. We reject fear of difference. We reject misogyny. We reject homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia.

We turn to the past to imagine better futures.

We stand with all those who on this day and every day feel excluded, endangered, in despair, especially when the past is weaponized against them. We renew our offer to build community with you, now and always, in as many venues as possible -- from the classroom to the internet to the pages of books to the streets.

We stand against walls. We reject hate. We affirm a better way forward that builds upon the best of what communities can build in order to live justly together.

Ich do invyte yow to joyne me and manye
othir goode folk yn a celebracioun across the entyre globe of the erthe. Yn
thys celebracioun we shal reade of oold bokes yn sondrye oold tonges. We shal
singe olde songes. We shal playe olde playes. Eny oold tonge will do, and eny
maner of readinge. Al thogh thys holidaye dyd start wyth blogges and twyterres
about Middel Englisshe, yet let that nat limit yn no waye the reache and
capaciousnesse of thys growinge holidaye. Everye olde language, everye poeme,
everye place, everye voyce. All are welcome that come wyth love and
understandinge to all. All are welcome that looke to the studye of the past nat
to proppe up dustye tradiciouns but ynstead to builde a bettir and more
ynclusive and peaceful and lovinge future. We shal make merrye yn the magical
dreamscape of 'social media,' and eke, yf we kan do yt, yn the material plane
of the 'real worlde' as wel.

Ye maye, paraventure, wisshe to reade from
the beginning of my Tales of
Caunterburye, but ye maye also wisshe to reade of eny
oothir boke or texte or scroll or manuscript that ye love. Ye maye even reade
the poetrye of John
Gower yf that ys yower thinge.

What are sum wayes to celebrate Whan That
Aprille Daye?

Gentil frendes, yf yt wolde plese yow to
celebrate Whan That Aprille Daye 2019, ye koude do eny of the followinge. Be
sure to use the hasshe-tagge #WhanThatAprilleDay19 on yower poostes of
twytter and facebooke and blogge.

•Counte downe to Whan That Aprille Daye wyth postes and
readinges.

•Maken a video of yowerself readinge (or singinge! or actinge!)
and share yt on the grete webbe of the internette.

•Planne a partye at yower classroome or hous to celebrate oolde
langages, and poost pictures to the ynternette.

•Read auncient langages to yower catte, and the catte shal be
moost mirthful.

•Make sum maner of cake or pastrye wyth oold wordes upon yt, and
feest upon yt wyth good folke and share pictures of yower festivitee. (And yet
beware the catte that shal seke to eaten of the icinge yn the hours of
derkenesse bifor the celebracioun.)

•Yf ye be bold, ye maye wisshe to share yower readinge yn
publique, yn a slam of poesye or a nighte of open mic. (Bringe the catte?)

•And for maximum Aprillenesse, marke all tweetes and poostes
wyth the hashtagge #WhanThatAprilleDay19 – remember the ‘Whan’ and ‘Aprille.’

What ys the poynte of Whan That Aprille
Daye?

Ower mission ys to celebrate al the
langages that have come bifor, and alle their joyes and sorrowes and richesse.

Ower mission ys to remynde folk of the
beautye and grete lovelinesse of studyinge the wordes of the past. And thys ys
for the mulitpicitye of wordes, of manye tonges, and no tonge ys bettir than
eny othir and everich tonge ys belovid of all othirs. And eke ower mission ys
to bringe to mynde the importaunce of supportinge the scolership and labour
that doth bringe thes wordes to us. To remynde folk to support the techinge of paleographye and of archival werke and eek, ywis, the techinge of thes oold
langages. To remynde folk of the gret blisse and joye of research libraryes and
the gret wysdam and expertyse of the libraryans that care for them across the
centuryes. To call to mynde the fundinge of the humanityes, the which ys lyke
the light of the sonne on the plantes of learninge and knowledge. For wythout
al of thes thinges, the past wolde have no wordes for us and we wolde be left mirtheless.

Ower mission ys also to have ynogh funne
to last until next Whan That Aprille Daye.

Note that thys event doth also coincide
wyth Aprille Fooles Daye, the which ys prettye awesome by cause we do love thes
langages and alle who love are yn sum maner also fooles.

Ich do hope wyth al myn herte that that
sum of yow good folke will joyne me on thys April fyrste for readinge and
celebratinge and foolinge. Lat us maken melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay19

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Because we are building an ark, we traveled to Arizona for the the third of our site visits, Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti (for parts 1 and 2 follow the links). One of us was already on the ground, in the neighborhood, if you like, the other arrived to join him.

Biosphere 2 (AZ)

If there were a governing topos for Biosphere 2 it might be “hold it.” This was the imperative lightly and amusingly delivered by our guide. There will be no bathroom breaks on the tour.

Something similar obtained for the original bionauts or “biosphereans” as they named themselves. Yet we know how that story ended--even as today, if you visit Biosphere, that is not the story which you will be told or the story that anyone wants to remember. The intention for the dome to remain sealed against the world failed. Those within did not manage to “hold it” (or to be held by it). Difference was that we only had to “hold it” for an hour. They had somehow to manage being held for two years, though the issue for them was not waste management. We learned that their effluvia was incorporated into a comprehensive system. Their urine became water once again; their excrement fertilizer for vegetables. They were much like the koi of today’s Biosphere, who participate in an aquaponics program which grows food without the need for soil using only one tenth of the water required for traditional farming. Biosphere was never as self sufficient as promised, triggering crises of oxygen (which rapidly diminished), carbon (which proliferated) and human nourishment (which became scarce). As one page from a journal kept at the time observes, “the current diet” does “not provide enough calories and fat to perform the physically demanding tasks leaving a burned out biospherean at the end of the day.” The same journal entry recognizes the importance of a “closed system” but observes that there has been or needs to be a “change of mission objective.” “This project is not about survivalism in a closed system,” the entry reads or posits; the objective is not “mission-based,” but a “laboratory.” Holding it, holding out was a rubric or a protocol or a heuristic, not a do or die reality. Or so went the narrative from some of the occupants.

Part of the problem seems to have been that the project was conceived for an extra-terrestrial gaze. Why else attempt a terrarium, a system sealed against its outside? One day, one day, what occurs here upon the Earth (which the biosphereans named Biosphere 1) will occur in space (in a ship that we presume would be Biosphere 3). But with failure, with multiple failures, as the journal entry observes, comes the possibility of enlargement, of system change. If an ark cannot, even when vacuum sealed and minutely articulated in its cycles of water, heat, and air, generate sufficient support for living for those within, then that vessel must open to what it lacks. Or cascade into ruin. The orientation shifted back earthwards. And the project became, as in truth it always had been, a laboratory or proving ground or kitchen for concepts that might one day apply on other planets, but whose purchase might be closer to home: aquaponics for when Arizona runs even lower on water; the resuscitation of conservation techniques from now displaced First Peoples; the superlatively engineered “lungs” which create a pressure relieving valve deep within the structure; an laboratory for climate science and desert terrain studies; a conference center; a tourist destination, welcoming anyone who will pay for the tour.

Enter the monkeys. They were brought aboard Biosphere 2 as companion animals. Our guide thought these galagos were supposed to be there as primate friends, fun to interact with. But unlike the humans who knew very well how many bananas made for a total daily allotment, the monkeys ate as much fruit as they pleased. They made a mess. They screamed in people’s faces. They were not good company. They were eventually moved to the San Diego Zoo. But neither were the humans good to each other. Frictions led to factions. At times the whole place seemed in an uproar: the oxygen depleting, the food stores becoming meager. Rice, wheat, corn, sorghum, sweet potatoes, soybeans, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, eggplant, peppers and leafy vegetables: none of these were growing as expected, and some of what did sprout was devoured by insects, bacteria, fungi. Well, none of this was confided to us by our guide, who was as upbeat as can be -- except for the part about the galagos. He loved those rebel monkeys and it showed. And he also offered two tales of proliferating stowaways: black ants transported inside with the soil shipped from Brazil for the Rainforest biome, and cockroaches from who knows where, finding their way into every crevice of the building. (We also note that katydids, morning glory vines, and unwanted microbes also managed to hide themselves aboard and cause perennial issues.) A daily vacuuming was conducted of the cockroaches, who had found in the Biosphere a paradise to populate. Hundreds were harvested and fed to the chickens, an unplanned cycle of protein sustainability. Our guide did not mention that in time these chickens stopped laying eggs and were devoured. As food became scarce the pigs were likewise entirely consumed.

Yes, all the bees and other pollinators died and the water was too thick with nutrients and the concrete walls triggered unforeseen chemical reactions with the plentiful atmospheric carbon. Yet not everything that unfolded in the Biosphere was a failure. In a favorite moment for both of us our tour group was escorted through a series of tunnels where we could see the various pipes for hot, cold and waste water running and experience the winds generated by the machines that heat and cool the architecture. After walking beneath savanna and sea, we reached a vast round area called The Lung. From the ceiling hung an enormous oval of black material that looked like industrial rubber. We were told it weighs six tons. As the air pressure in the room rises this black barrier ascends, allowing more air into the space. When the pressure drops, the giant diaphragm slowly falls, pushing air back through the doorways and into the Biosphere again. In and out, in and out, the building takes a slow meditative breath. This device had been installed because of the sheer number of glass panels that enclose the Biosphere. Had this machine not been invented to alleviate pressure automatically when needed, those panels would have shattered long ago. Conflict among the crew members and disagreements among those running the project from the outside indicate that no community analogue to The Lung had been put in place. Hold it never works out all that well, neither as imperative nor as aspiration. The Biosphere experiment was a grand failure, both scientifically and socially.

But “what if?” With error, with breakdown, with scandal, the imperative to “Hold it” transformed back into a constitutive declaration of possibility, the holding open of a sentence to imagine so many various ways in which that sentence might close and so make a world or worlds. “What if” reorients the project towards what it makes possible, refusing to close in or out on one criterion that would constitute success. For the closing of a sentence is never a done deal. It just marks the runtime of a given project or the throwing forward of an idea and technique. The sentence closes and then its is time to take inventory of the world that’s made with all the stowaways along with those invited aboard to see what happens next. What should the next sentence be? What if …? Galagos do not make good Biosphereans but the cockroaches do as the chickens like them and this liking increases egg production. For a while. No system is really closed. There are always unexpected tenants. And when those stowed away make their presences felt, it is time for the system to change. Transfer the unruly galagos to a galago-centric environ. Let the ants do their own thing for, in truth, they lead a parallel existence to the project--a world within a world within a world. Feed the cockroaches to the chickens, and their eggs to the humans, and the stories to the visitors. Ensure that the humans get the medical attention they need along with the calories. By the failure of Biosphere 2, the terrarium became something to learn and think with, an Earth to play with so as to limit the risks of playing globally.You can still tour it, and you’ll learn a great deal about ingenuity, resilience, reinvention, re-story-ation.

But “Hold it.” What if, still, there’s something missing. Something you have to travel elsewhere in Arizona to locate?

Arcosanti (AZ)

“What if?” The phrase appears on the cover of every one of architect-ceramist Paolo Soleri’s notebooks on arcology like some sort of talisman against foreclosure. What if…? Don’t stop me. Let’s just wonder. What if, instead of proliferating across the surface of the earth, projecting human habitation at distance and so wasting time and people, we agreed that the “single family home will be the wrong package.” What if “tightly woven minimalist packages for entire communities ... become mandatory?” How might that work? What if we just did without or demoted the car and concentrated our resources, building cities or “arks” that weave together all our needs (food, books, theater, work, community, green spaces, lovely views, fresh air) and which do so in ways that enhance the environment rather than processing the earth as just so much empty or emptied space in which settler-colonist “humans” can manifest their destiny?

“Arcology” is the name Soleri gave to this iterative endeavor or, in the words of our Biospherean archivist, “project.” And heady as the project sometimes seems, it recognizes the co-imbrication of material structure and community. Arcologies, for Soleri, are all about Biosphere 2’s lungs, their ability to regulate pressures of all kinds. Arcologies are all atmosphere; they open perpetually to their outsides. The aim as Soleri elaborates, was “not to imitate the nano-biotechnology of organisms but to put to use its teaching: self-containment, miniaturization, complexity, automation under the tutelage of volition.” “Volition,” he continues or claims, is “the (automated) inner drive of learning.” While “religion is the bonding (derived from religare in Latin) indispensable for the volitional sparks.” You cannot maintain one without the other.

Far from a sealed system like that to which Biosphere 2 aspired, arcologies model flows of energy, information, affect, as communities form in and around the making of a world within a specific landscape that is intimate to that process. They provide no answers and offer no solutions. Instead they pose the whole business of building or dwelling as a question and seek out volunteers to explore the nature of the experiment with them. They might turn sour, vicious, fascist. But what if…? And so it was that Soleri went on to imagine, in pen and ink, some thirty arcologies that attempt to think and build a community and an environment together--the word arcology itself a blending or meeting of architecture (life in plan) and ecology (life in place), modeling architecture itself as a handling or solicitation and distribution of flow within a set of boundaries that must constantly be thought in order to be maintained and so maintain all within them.

Yes. You can call it utopian. That it certainly is. But as our tour guide at Arcosanti told us utopias are no good -- impossible, maybe even totalitarian -- but they do accomplish some good. Spurs to thought and striving, they are full of aspirations. Heuristics. Experiments. They are not total systems, at least not the kind you ever want to live in. But that’s OK because life never works according to plan (no matter how finely detailed that plan appears when sketched so intricately on butcher’s paper). Our guide was also a resident. He told us that he likes Arcosanti because it is an open utopia, an adaptive throng, long in its traditions and largely unrealized as a dream. He spoke to his gathered auditors about the difference between an intentional community, which builds a wall around itself and calls itself the world, and an extensional community, which even though anchored moves outwards into a world full of strangers, new ideas, unexpected challenge. He did not think that Paolo Soleri really intended any of his blueprints for a “City in the Image of Man” to be made real, not at least as drawn; the work of realization is up to those who do the building, and they may have to revise the plans many times along the way. Pleasing as it might be to behold Soleri’s plans for “Arcoforte” perched atop a cliff or “Noahbabel” straddling the verge where land gives way to sea, these are not architectures for anyone really to dwell within, at least not in body. A thing of fits and starts, an arcology is the work of many hands. Each pair leaves an imprint on the total design, builders and makers with lingering impress.

Coincidentally Soleri lived and worked in Arizona only a few hours north from where Biosphere 2 in time came to stand. He mostly supported himself as a ceramist, creating resonant bells out of clay and then out of metal with shimmering patina. He embarked on his arcology projects with the resources from these projects. On a mesa seventy miles from Phoenix, Arcosanti was originally supposed to have been a sustainable city for 500, then for 2500, then for up to 6000. These days many of those who live there (they number about 70) are suggesting 500 as sufficient population. At least for now. At the time we visited the youngest year-round resident was six weeks old, the oldest (Soleri’s sister) nearly 90.

But with a new CEO and changes to the demographics of both those who make their home in its high desert structures as well as the 30,000 people who yearly make the pilgrimage, Arcosanti seems to have found itself at a road with many possible directions ahead, each of them a what if that will profoundly alter its destiny. One small veer that we noticed our tour guide make as he spoke the Arcosanti story stays with us. He ended the tour of the environs in the green room behind a large outdoor amphitheatre. Above a piano hangs a portrait of Colly Soleri, Paolo’s spouse. Our guide told us that he wanted us to linger here so that we could think about the Great Man narratives we love to tell, centered around imperious and egotistical and often toxic figures. Is it enough to praise the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri, as if they strode into empty lands and dreamt within them some vision that derives from them alone? Our guide asked us to think about the labor and community that Great Man narratives will always obscure. He told us to think about Colly, without whom none of what Soleri achieved would have been possible. She should not remain invisible. We did linger with her, and hope we can be forgiven if we thought about Mrs. Noah and what she gave to or resisted within her husband’s crazy project.

In Arcosanti and Biosphere 2 we found two different stagings of what we have come to understand as the core problematic of Noah’s Ark, parceled out under the contrasting topoi of “hold it” and “what if.” The two are not opposites. They may, in practice, jar, even war, but in truth they designate different moments in a project and its projection. Hold it signifies duration, a suspension of inquiry during the madness of fulfilling what has been decided or set in motion. We paid for the tour and this is what the tour entails: no bathrooms, a few stairs, some low headroom, a story of possibility beyond serial failures. Do you agree? But as visiting Biosphere 2 and Ascosanti and thinking them together taught us, “hold it” remains premised on a constitutive “what if.” A structure closes only, it is to be hoped, to open again and inquire into what and who were made and unmade in the process. In and by its failure to hold on or out, the crew of Biosphere 2 enabled the structure to recover its orientation towards the unforeseen.

For Arcosanti, the question is different: can its orientation to possibility, to the project of projecting an open inquiry into building (what is building?) hold out? The expansive “what if” requires some reserves, resources, futures-in-process. If you visit Arcosanti today, you will encounter the co-presence of this “hold it” and “what if” in numerous small ways as the project adjusts to who its visitors are now; to the differences among its community. You also see it writ small in physical terms, in the bells they make, whose sale now sustains the site financially. All bear different markings, markings keyed to their individual makers, who learn the process but inscribe their own marks within the general pattern. There are rules. But no set patterns. Or, those patterns that Arcosanti offers contain within them the capacity to accommodate new arrivals and be changed by what they add. It is poetic, this soliciting of drift in making.

“Montezuma’s Castle” (AZ)

We wrote that it is a coincidence that Arcosanti looms some three hours drive from Biosphere 2, coincidence that both these speculative, utopian projects, make their home in Arizona. And perhaps it is so. Or, perhaps, in a longer, different story tuned to the complicated and the difficult, we might recognize in both an enduring narrative of utopian movements West into land made seemingly vacant and so available by way of violence fast and slow. The orientation of the buildings at Arcosanti towards the sun was anticipated by Arizona’s first peoples, the Anasazi and the Hohokam and the Hopi, as were the irrigation devices at Biosphere 2. The “what ifs” of both Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti unfold on ground long occupied, ground cleared through bloodshed, ground on which descendents of those first peoples still live along with the ghosts of those who came before and who were relocated without the (we assume) gentler hands that relocated the galagos or the biosphereans.

Had we planned better, had we anticipated the timber trails along which Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti would lead our thoughts, we would have journeyed a little further up the road to what is now ridiculously called Montezuma’s Castle (in truth, one of us has been there many times before). Thirty two miles north of Arcosanti’s mesa rises an “apartment building” structure erected by the Sinagua people, whose name means “without water” in English. All these names are crazy, the dreams of white colonists: Montezuma had nothing to do with the expertly engineered architecture. The anthropological designation “Sinagua” is also pure fantasy. The ancestors of the Hohokam and other indigenous southwestern peoples were masters of living with water, not without. Their canals still cross the state of Arizona and make Phoenix possible today. The area around the beautiful cliff dwellings was continuously inhabited for five hundred years before being abandoned early in the fifteenth century -- a feat of near continuous occupation that Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti are unlikely to match. Five stories high, set breathtakingly into the sheer face of a cliff that overlooks a tranquil creek, prone to less tranquil flood, almost four thousand square feet in its living spaces, this immodest architecture was built by hands that have in the narration of American history been actively forgotten. The gorgeous pink and white walls are a reminder that desert communities experimenting with sustainable living are nothing new -- and have been far more successful in the past than as practiced now. White history is typically shallow history. The “empty” lands across which colonists or utopianists build their arks have for millennia been settled, an abiding home for projects of future making that surpass in duration and cohesion more recent arrivals.

So hold it. What will it take to imagine a refuge that did not forsake or disown the presences in land taken as if given when that land has been stolen? What if today’s communal experiments, arks or arcologies, were to hold on to that obligation and build with it? In their own sometimes small ways we see glimmers (however foreclosed) of that possibility at both Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti.